Contour vs Non-Contour based Word Segmentation from Handwritten Text Lines: an Experimental Analysis

This paper compares contour based and non-contours based techniques for extracting words from unconstrained handwritten text lines. Proposed novel approach is based on contours of the words rather only considering threshold for inter-word gaps as previous studies. In this approach, contour of each word is examined along with threshold for inter-word gaps to extract words with high confidence. Unlike previous studies, preprocessing technique is not applied, that enhance the speed significantly. Furthermore, a simple technique for punctuation detection is proposed to increase accuracy of word extraction. For fair comparison text lines are taken randomly from IAM benchmark database and threshold calculation is kept same for all techniques. Experiments thus performed, exhibit improved results and speed over the conventional word extraction methods. Furthermore, developed techniques and results are compared with the other approaches available in the literature using same benchmark database